What Fresh Express and Harley-Davidson Have in Common: Customer-Centricity

Last Tuesday, I spoke with Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati about what it takes for businesses to become truly customer-centric. He emphasized the need for companies to ask customers the right questions, make creative leaps to figure out how best to serve customers and take action. This week, we'll take a look at two companies that have gotten the customer-centric approach right: Fresh Express and Harley-Davidson.

Fresh Express
"Since the 1980S, bagged salad -- that staple of every grocery store's produce section -- has risen from nonexistence to a $2.5 billion-a-year industry," begins Gulati's new book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. "The creative leap that allowed companies like Fresh Express and others to turn a commodity product into a growth juggernaut required looking beyond the traditional questions that most companies ask about their customers: What do they like and not like about my product?"

The bagged salad companies instead asked questions about their customers. As Gulati explained during our conversation, "The lettuce company figured out its customers are busy people. They have a strong desire to eat healthy, but somehow this chopping and washing becomes a big barrier to doing so." So the companies started making the whole salad for their customers.

Harley-Davidson
Similarly, Harley-Davidson figured out that their customers weren't buying motorcycles simply to drive fast.
"For them the realization many years ago was people buy motorcycles in this country as a hobby. People traditionally have hobbies for recreation, relaxation and escape. But increasingly, in the last 20-25 years, people have hobbies to meet other people," Gulati says.

So Harley created the Harley Owners' Group, (H.O.G.), in hopes of creating a social outlet for its customers. Gulati says, "When you buy a Harley-Davidson, you don't just buy a motorcycle; you buy into a lifestyle. They have weekend get-togethers, they have rallies, they organize vacations."

The importance of outside-in thinking
According to Gulati, coming up with innovations such as bagged salad or a motorcycle lifestyle association are impossible when companies make "inside-out" inquiries: in other words, when questions start with the product and then move to the customer. Rather, both of these companies took an "outside-in" approach, asking questions about what was going on in the bigger picture of their customers' lives, which is where real customer-centricity starts.